One day, digital will be it. Analog will just be another oddity, and that's fine, too. I have no great misgivings about it, but there will always be something to analog. It's the smell of the tape and all that visceral, physical stuff.

I'm a collector, a tinkerer, and a tweaker, like a lot of people, and recording equipment is really easy to fetishize.

Analog was perfected over 70 years, though. Digital will one day be fantastic. I'm sure of it.

I wish I could go out farther from my musical history. I didn't realize how hard it was until I tried to do it. All the basic tracks on Romanian Names were done in my basement, alone, without any of the self-consciousness that comes with being in the studio. It was a completely different process. And those two things definitely made the record sound different. But you want this quantum leap from record to record, and maybe if I did make a quantum leap I'd make an unlistenable album. So maybe I'm lucky that I can't pull it off.

One thing that has happened is a revolution in digital consumer recording, and overall, that's a great thing for art, but parallel to that there's been a revolution in boutique audio companies making excellent gear.

In fact, it's in my interest to love digital recording, and I just spent a ton on a new digital recording system, so I speak from a place of heavy investment in both sides.

The world is just going to continue to fragment, and that's a great thing.